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This article investigates whether political violence has long-term effects on attitudes toward political participation. This is an interesting topic because public engagement and social capital play a crucial role in shaping the economy and democracy. We exploit a recent survey on the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War to shed light on this question. Our findings indicate that being a member of a family that suffered violence during the Civil War is related to a higher interest, knowledge and engagement in politics. These results stand in stark contrast to the common expectation that political violence leads to lower public engagement, while they are consistent with other studies focusing on the short-term consequences of civil conflicts. Therefore, the legacy of political violence, far from creating political apathy, may be the higher involvement of citizens in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit the GEOSTAT 2011 population grid with a very high 1 km2 resolution to document that Spain presents the lowest density of settlements among European countries. Only a small fraction of the Spanish territory is inhabited, particularly in its southern half, which goes hand in hand with a high degree of population concentration. We uncover through standard regression analysis and spatial regression discontinuity that this anomaly cannot be accounted for by adverse geographic and climatic conditions. The second part of the paper takes a historical perspective on Spain's settlement patterns by showing that the spatial distribution of the population has been very persistent in the last two centuries, and that the abnormally low density of settlements with respect to European neighbors was already visible in the 19th century, which indicates that this phenomenon has not emerged recently as a consequence of the transformations associated with industrialization and tertiarization. Using data on ancient sites, we find that Spain did not feature scarcity of settlements in comparison to other countries in premedieval times, suggesting that its current anomalous settlement pattern has not always existed and is, therefore, not intrinsic to its geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Corruption is harmful for public finances and appears closely related to fiscal deficits. We open a new avenue in addressing the effects of corruption on public deficits through fiscal decentralization. For a sample of 31 OECD countries over the period 1986–2010, we find that fiscal decentralization contributes to mitigating the adverse effects of corruption on public deficits. In addition, our findings indicate diversity in the effects of fiscal decentralization, in that it appears related to lower deficits in countries with higher levels of corruption but not in less corrupt countries. Our results suggest that bringing the government closer to the people through fiscal decentralization in relatively corrupt countries leads to more responsible fiscal management. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper shows evidence of strong heterogeneity in the relationship between government size and growth, depending on the quality of public sector institutions. Focusing on a wide sample of developed and developing countries over the period 1981-2005, we find that government size reduces growth when bureaucracy quality is low, whereas no significant effect is observed for sufficiently high levels of bureaucracy quality. The results hold both in cross-section and panel data analyses and are robust to a large number of robustness checks. These findings have important implications for assessing the role of government size in economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]